We may be inclined to doubt, however, whether the task before the genius
of Greece, the task of making Proserpine out of a porker, was really so
colossal. The primitive mind is notoriously capable of entertaining,
simultaneously, the most contradictory notions. Thus, in the Australian
"Legend of Eerin," the mourners implore Byamee to accept the soul of the
faithful Eerin into his Paradise, Bullimah. No doubt Byamee heard, yet
Eerin is now a little owl of plaintive voice, which ratters warning cries
in time of peril. {65} No incongruity of this kind is felt to be a
difficulty by the childlike narrators. Now I conceive that, starting
with the relatively high idea of a Spirit of the Grain, early man was
quite capable of envisaging it both spiritually and in zoomorphic form
(accidentally conditioned here into horse, there into goat, pig, or what
not). But these views of his need not exclude his simultaneous belief in
the Corn Spirit as a being anthropomorphic, "Mother Earth," or "Mother
Grain," as we follow the common etymology; or that of Mannhardt ([Greek
text]) [Greek text]="barley-mother"). If I am right, poetry and the
higher religion moved from the first on the line of the anthropomorphic
Lady of the Harvest and the Corn, Mother Barley: while the popular folk-
lore of the Corn Spirit (which found utterance in the mirth of
harvesting, and in the magic ritual for ensuring fertility), followed on
the line of the pig. At some seasons, and in some ceremonies, the pig
represented the genius of the corn: in general, the Lady of the Corn
was--Demeter. We really need not believe that the two forms of the
genius of the corn were ever _consciously_ identified. Demeter never was
a Pig! {66}

"The Peruvians, we are told, believed all useful plants to be animated by
a divine being who causes their growth," says Mr. Frazer. {67} The
genealogical table, then, in my opinion, is:--